Gavin shook his head and cut into his meat loaf. “If that’s what you’re assuming, then you’d be wrong. And I’ll answer the question you’re really asking.” His voice softened. So did his eyes. “Your brother worships you.”
Her face flamed again. “That’s not—”
“To him, there isn’t anything in the world you can’t do. He thinks you’re the greatest. He knows he could have ended up in foster care when your parents died, but you managed to keep him with you. He knows you worked your tail off to pay the bills and see that he finished high school. He loves you, Anna.”
“Then why?” she whispered, her voice breaking despite her will. “Why does he keep using me the way he does? Why does he only come home when he wants money? Why does he keep breaking his promises to me?”
With the first tear that slipped down her cheek, Gavin was out of his chair and kneeling beside her, wrapping his arms around her. “He doesn’t do it to hurt you, Anna, he doesn’t. He just takes you for granted, that’s all. He assumes you’ll always be there for him. Don’t cry, honey. Come on, you’re killing me here.”
She sniffed, wiped a hand across her eyes and pushed away from him. “I’m not crying.”
He gave her a crooked smile and used his thumb to catch a final tear. “Good.”
She sniffed twice more. “I never cry.”
“Never?”
“Never. It’s useless.”
“I hear it relieves tension, makes you feel better.”
“It stops up your nose, makes your eyes red and gives you a headache. A waste of time.”
She’d obviously found her balance again, so Gavin backed off. It was surprisingly hard to do. He resumed his seat.
“I owe you an apology,” she said quietly.
Gavin smiled. “You didn’t get me that wet.”
“I mean for what I said yesterday, about your song-writing.”
“Forget it,” he said with a wave of his fork.
“I can’t. It was unforgivably rude of me. I’m normally overly polite, I’m told.”
“I guess I just bring out the best in you. Forget it. You said what was on your mind.”
“No.” She shook her head, squared her shoulders, met his gaze steadily. “I was angry that you thought Ben could end up like your cousin. Angry,” she said, her voice falling, shaking, her gaze dropping to her plate, “because I’m afraid you’re right and I don’t know what to do about it.”
Gavin let out a slow breath. This was the first time she’d admitted Ben was heading for serious trouble.
She raised her gaze to him again. “I took it out on you, and I’m sorry. I don’t know anything about rock-and-roll music or what it takes to write a song. I’m sure that what you do brings enjoyment to a lot of people.”
“I hope it does.” He wished one of those people who found pleasure in his work was her. “But you still find it frivolous.”
She gave him a weak smile. “I find most things frivolous unless they have to do with day-to-day survival.” She winced. “Ouch. That sounded...pathetic. I didn’t mean it that way.”
“It sounded scary as hell,” Gavin said. “Life is short, Anna. Everyone’s entitled to a little enjoyment now and then. It helps make the bad times less bad. I’ve been trying to find out what you do for enjoyment.”
With a determined smile, she picked up her fork. “I eat meals cooked by someone else. This really is delicious.” So delicious, in fact, that she decided not to say anything about the damp towel in the bathroom floor, the toilet seat he’d left up, the whiskers in the sink and the two pairs of shoes in the living room instead of his room where they belonged. “Honestly, it’s wonderful.”
“Come on, you can do better than that. What do you do for fun?”
She shrugged, took a bite of meat loaf. “Read. Watch television.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere. What do you like to read?”
“You know, the usual. Biographies, self-help books, that sort of thing.”
Gavin nearly choked on a swallow of iced tea. When he stopped coughing several moments later, he stared at her. “That’s your idea of fun and enjoyment?”
Her expression sang of hurt feelings. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Oh, darlin’, we’re going to have to do something about you.”
Anna was positive that she did not care for his tone, nor the amusement twinkling in his eyes.
To redirect his thinking, she asked, “When did you say Ben left to come here?”
Gavin’s smile faded slowly. “Sometime before noon Wednesday.”
“Then where is he?” she asked, worry creeping through her. “You said he was coming here. He should have been here by now.”
Gavin frowned at his plate. “Maybe I was wrong. The note he left said he was going to get the money he owed me. Since he always comes to you when he needs money... Don’t take offense. He’s admitted that to me several times.”
“He promised me last year that he would never ask me for money again. Maybe he’s trying to keep that promise.”
“By going somewhere else for the money?”
“Where would he go?” But Anna feared she knew the answer.
“Somewhere he could place a bet and hope to win. Let’s see if we can find him.” Gavin pushed back from the table and stood.
“What are you going to do?”
“Go to the fount of all information these days—the Internet.”
From his duffel bag Gavin took his notebook computer and connected it to Anna’s phone jack by the desk in the den.
“I don’t see how you’re going to find Ben this way.”
“You’d be surprised what you can find out on the Net. The world is a much, much smaller place than any of us realize. There’s a musicians’ newsgroup that should be able to help us track him down.”
He reset his dial-up settings to use his service provider’s 800 number instead of the local Santa Monica number he normally used, then logged on to the Internet. From there he went one at a time to three of the newsgroups he frequented and posted messages for anyone who had seen Ben during the last few days to e-mail Gavin.
“Now what?” Anna asked.
“Now we wait and see if someone responds. It might be a day or two before we get anything, but if Ben hits any of the usual places, somebody on one of those newsgroups will spot him and let me know.”
It didn’t take a day or two for information. When Gavin checked his e-mail an hour later he had a message from an old friend in Las Vegas who had seen Ben the night before, winning at the craps table in one of the casinos.
Frowning, Gavin e-mailed back that if his friend saw Ben again, tell him Gavin was looking for him.
“Las Vegas,” Anna said, her eyes filled with distress.
For that look in Anna’s eyes, Gavin could cheerfully strangle Ben Collins.
Tuesday evening when Anna came home from work Gavin had another surprise for her. One living room chair had been moved aside to make room for a full-blown stereo system with so many buttons and lights it was dizzying. Plastic bags, cardboard boxes and large sections of packing material littered the floor, coffee table, chairs.
“What have you done?” she demanded, her blood chilling at the thought of what a setup like this must cost. Not to mention the mess.
“Damn. Either you’re early, or I’m running behind.”
“I’m not early. What have you done? Where did all this come from?”
“Then I’m late. I meant to be finished before you got home.” He grinned up at her from where he knelt in front of the three-foot-tall speakers.
“I would hope so.” Eyes wide, Anna surveyed the damage to her once-neat living room. “Look at the mess,” she cried.
He blinked and looked around. “What mess?” He frowned at the scattered packaging. “That? Oh. I’ll take care of it.”
“You most certainly will. When you box everything up and take it back where you got it.”
Tilting his head,
he peered at her through narrowed eyes. “Now why would I want to take it back?”
“Because I’m not paying for it.”
His eyes widened. “Of course you’re not. Who asked you to?”
Anna forced a deep breath, but said nothing.
“Look again, darlin’.” His voice took on an edge. “I’m not Ben. I didn’t spend your money or charge anything to your account. Frankly, I’m insulted that you’d think I would.”
Realizing her mistake, Anna felt her cheeks sting with heat. It had seemed so normal to come home and find a man had brought a new toy into her house and expected her to pay for it. But he was right. He wasn’t Ben. He wasn’t her father.
“I’m sorry,” she told him. Then she thought to ask, “How did you get all this here on that motorcycle?”
He pursed his lips, took a slow, deep breath, then relaxed. “I had it delivered. Now, you have to go out and come back in.”
Anna blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
With a screwdriver in his hand, he gestured toward the back door. “Go back out, count to ten—make it twenty. Twenty-five. Then come back in.”
“What are you doing? What is all this stuff? You can’t possibly get this mess cleaned up in a count of twenty-five. I’d have to count to five hundred. Twice. Slowly.”
“Oh, ye of little faith. A little trust, please. Just go out for a minute, then come back in.”
“I’m already in. I see no point in going out again, only to come right back in.”
“The point,” he said, putting down his screwdriver and rising to grip her shoulders and turn her toward the back door, “is in the fun.”
She skidded to a halt on the kitchen floor and peered skeptically over her shoulder at him. “Fun?”
“Fun. It’s not a four-letter word. Go.” He gave her a nudge toward the door. “And don’t forget to count.”
An amazing thing happened as Anna stood in her broiling hot garage and counted slowly to twenty-five. A sense of what could only be called anticipation bubbled to life in her chest. She knew that she was considered, by all who knew her, to be a dull, humorless person. The thought never fazed her. She was also thought of as smart, honest to a fault and highly responsible. Those things, in her opinion, were much more important.
Ben, when he came home on his infrequent visits, was always trying to get her to go out with him to a nightclub or an action-adventure movie or a rock concert. Stick-in-the-mud. That’s what he called her.
Wastrel. Irresponsible. That’s what she’d tried so hard not to think of him.
She couldn’t help it if she’d never learned how to have fun. When other girls her age were playing hopscotch on the sidewalk, Anna had been looking after her baby brother while her parents were out partying, or at home sleeping off the last party. She’d understood even then that other families worked differently, but she’d never let it bother her.
The thought of her parents made her head ache. She had such ambiguous feelings about them. She had loved them, worshiped them, but she had never been blind to their faults.
They had loved her and Ben, but they had been so young themselves—their mother had been sixteen when Anna was born; their father, seventeen. They never finished growing up. Love, to them, did not necessarily equate with responsibility. By the time Anna was ten, she was virtually in charge of the house and her baby brother. Mama and Daddy had been more than likely to forget they even had jobs—when they’d had them—or bills to pay, much less children.
There was always a party to go to, a new toy or gadget to buy, a trip to take. A bet to place.
That was where Ben came by his love of gambling. Both their mother and father had been gamblers. Not very good ones, but they had loved it It was all a game to them; life, children. Just a game.
If Anna wanted clean clothes, she learned early to wash and iron them herself. If once in a while she’d wished she could go out and draw squares on the driveway and hop around on one foot with the other girls instead of cleaning the house or cooking supper, she got over it. She had never had time for such games, never learned the appeal of them.
But Gavin Marshall somehow managed to make the prospect of having fun seem...fun.
What would it hurt to let down her guard and see how the rest of the world lived? If she managed to make a fool of herself in front of him, so what? He was only temporary in her life. He would be gone soon and she would never see him again.
So, against what she considered her nature, she stood in the suffocating garage and counted. When she reached fifty, she decided it was too hot in the garage for fun. She opened the door to the kitchen and breathed a sigh of relief as air-conditioned air hit her like a welcome wall of ice.
“Okay, I went out. Now what—” She stopped abruptly at the edge of the living room, amazed. Every scrap of debris, every plastic wrap, every cardboard box, was right where it had been, scattered across the room. “I thought you were going to clean up the mess.”
“What mess? Here.” He took her by the arm and led her toward the couch. “Sit right there.”
“You want me to sit on the cardboard box or the plastic bag?”
“See? I knew you had a sense of humor.” He shoved the packing materials onto the floor. “How’s that?”
With her purse still hanging from the crook of her arm, Anna planted her hands on her hips. “You’re going to clean up every bit of this.”
“What?” He glanced around the room, but his mind was obviously on something else. “You mean, the boxes and stuff? Sure. No problem. But first, sit.”
“I cannot possibly sit surrounded by this much trash.”
Gavin heaved a sigh and rolled his eyes. “You’re bound and determined to ruin this, aren’t you?”
“I don’t even know what this is. But cleaning up this mess can’t possibly ruin anything. It might send the garbagemen to the chiropractor, but at least the room will be livable.”
“Okay, okay.” Grumbling about how some people had no sense of adventure, Gavin tore through the room, stuffing bags, cardboard and thousands of little white peanuts into the boxes the equipment had come in, carting the boxes to the garage.
With an extra pair of hands, Anna decided, the work would go twice as fast. Besides, how could she trust him to get it all when he hadn’t even noticed it was there? She started gathering some of the trash herself.
Gavin practically barked at her. “Sit. I said I’d do it, and I will.”
Dammit, he’d wanted to surprise her, and she wasn’t cooperating. She was more concerned with a little debris than with him or the equipment he’d brought into her home.
Imagine thinking she would have to pay for it. It added another dimension to the picture he had of how things went around here when Ben showed his irresponsible face.
Gavin picked up the last box, gave the room a final sweep, and carried the box to the garage.
“All right, that’s done. Ah, hell. Go change clothes. You can’t do this all trussed up in a suit.”
“Do what? Precisely?”
He grinned. “Nothing illegal. Just... Will you just go change clothes, please?”
By the time she came back, the pizza he’d ordered had arrived and Gavin had found his good mood again. “Much better,” he lied. She was still trussed up, this time in pressed slacks, button-down shirt, socks and sneakers. Repressed, he thought yet again. “Now sit. Eat.”
She picked up the pizza box from the coffee table and headed for the dinette.
“Oh, no.” He snatched the box from her hands. “Just get napkins and something to drink. Plates, if you insist.”
“You don’t mean for us to eat in the living room.”
“That’s exactly what I mean.” The struggle on her face was interesting. Poor girl was so uptight and set in her ways, she couldn’t even imagine breaking her routine enough to eat pizza in the living room. “Come on,” he encouraged, wiggling his brows. “Live dangerously.”
She looked down at the pale blue li
ving room carpet, then seemed to come to a decision—a difficult one—before looking up at him. “You’ll be careful? You won’t spill anything?”
With a hand to his chest, he gave her his best wounded look. “What do I look like, a slob?”
She pursed her lips.
“Never mind. Don’t answer that. I’ll be careful, I promise. It’s carpet, Anna, not hammered gold. Just get the napkins and drinks, will you?”
With a look of reluctance, she finally turned toward the kitchen.
Gavin knelt beside the new stereo system and dug the stack of CDs out of the Blockbuster bag. He took his time, trying to let go of his irritation that had reared again. He didn’t want to be ticked off when he introduced her to rock and roll.
He could have avoided all the trouble and expense—not that he would miss the money; hell, he was rolling in it these days—by just having her watch MTV.
Nah, too far out for a novice to appreciate. Too scary if he’d had her watch late at night when they aired the really weird stuff.
VH-1, then. He could have gone with that. They played a lot of good stuff. But he wanted to introduce Anna to the music without the distraction of visuals. Visuals that could prejudice her against the music, he thought, picturing some of the videos he’d seen lately. Some called them art. Anna, he feared, would not. So he had decided on CDs. Pop, mostly. Middle-of-the-road, mainstream stuff. It seemed the best place to start.
Anna returned with plates, napkins, two glasses of iced tea and two lap trays. She wasn’t taking any chances, he thought, with her pale blue carpet.
He found the CD he wanted, plucked it from its case and slid it into the unit. “All you have to do is listen. With an open mind, if you please. No judgment, no prejudice allowed.”
“You still haven’t told me what’s going on.”
“Music Appreciation 101. Introduction to Rock and Roll.”
Her expression shifted from suspicious to deadpan. “You’re joking, right? You know I don’t always get jokes.”
“No joke.” He adjusted the volume so as not to shatter her eardrums, then crossed to where she still stood. With a light touch to her shoulders, he nudged her until she sat on the couch. “Lesson number one. This,” he said, plopping down next to her and reaching for his tray, “is Sting.”
Until You Page 9